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| The company of The Balusters. (Photo: Jeremy Daniel.) |
David Lindsay-Abaire’s The Balusters, which enjoyed a twelve-week limited run as part of the Manhattan Theatre Club season, focuses on the tensions between neighbors of different races, cultural backgrounds and predilections whose veneer of politesse cracks under the pressure of their pursuit of different agendas. It’s a distinctly twenty-first century version of a social high comedy built around a melting-pot aristocracy that’s assumed to have eliminated the exclusionary class barriers of an earlier time but hasn’t really: the old divisions keep popping up, along with the old resentments. This variation of high comedy has produced some highly entertaining American plays (like Smart People and last season’s Eureka Day) and one masterpiece, Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park. The Balusters isn’t on the same level.
The characters in The Balusters are members of the community association in a comfortable landmarked neighborhood in an unidentified city. Three of them, Elliot (Richard Thomas), Penny (Marylouise Burke) and Ruth (Margaret Colin), are old-timers who have lived here since the community was white. Elliot, who has chaired the association for as long as anyone can remember – there is no specified term limit – is a realtor who sold the others their homes, and his strong opinions about the way neighborhood problems should be addressed generally direct the voting. Willow (Kayli Carter) is the most woke of the group, a characteristic that the others confront with a kind of jocular irritation; when they get together in the opening scene Ruth makes sure to wear her rabbit coat just to bait Willow. Except for Alan (Michael Esper), the harried board secretary who struggles to keep the group discussion on point, the other members are all people of color: Isaac (Ricardo Chavira) is Hispanic, Melissa (Jeenya Yi) is Chinese, and Brooks (Carl Clemons-Hopkins) and the newcomer, Kyra (Anika Noni Rose), who has offered her home for the latest meeting, are Black. Brooks and Melissa are both gay. Alan is the one resident who finds Willow’s continual corrections assaultive; he feels that no matter how hard he tries to use the correct terminology, especially with the high schoolers he teaches, he always seems to be one step behind. Only one character doesn’t belong to this contemporary privileged group: Luz (Maria-Christina Oliveras), Kyra’s Hispanic housekeeper, who used to work for Elliot but quit under unpleasant circumstances that Lindsay-Abbaire divulges in the second half of the play.
Kyra is the catalyst for the conflict. She’s eager to jump into the conversation, she’s not put off by controversy, and she treats Elliot’s rather tyrannical handling of the board as a personal challenge. The issue that sets off adversarial fireworks is whether or not the board should work to get the city to put up a stop light in their neighborhood. Kyra, who has young daughters, is worried about their safety, but Elliot thinks a traffic light will obstruct a view that he deems one of the special qualities of the district. (The play is called The Balusters because the first item on the agenda is a local couple’s violating the style of the neighborhood, to Elliot’s mind, by importing balusters – from Home Depot, no less – to the façade of their house.) When Kyra refuses to back down, he treats her like an upstart who doesn’t understand the history of this place she has just moved into, or what he sees as its priorities. And their set-to has a racial tinge, though he denies it.
The play is fun for about two-thirds of the way, partly because the playwright exposes the characters’ hidden motivations with a certain scathing wit but mostly because the cast is so sharp. (Kenny Leon directs them with considerable skill.) Oliveras is the only member of the company whose touch on her lines is too heavy, but that isn’t entirely her fault: Luz is more a device than a character. I especially enjoyed watching Burke, with her floating, tremulous voice – she’s like a slightly decrepit fairy – and Colin, who does lovely, decorative things with her lines, wrapping them up like surprise gift packages.
The stockpiled revelations in the play are amusing, in a Desperate Housewives sort of way, but there are too many; eventually they weigh it down. But what takes the play apart, finally, is that, like his characters, Lindsay-Abbaire has an agenda. Though Kyra is no saint, Elliot turns out to be the real villain of the piece, which climaxes in an implausible explosion that even Richard Thomas, a superlative character actor, can’t pull off.
Broadway in HD carried the Roundabout Theatre revival of Fallen Angels for a few weeks last month. First produced in 1925, it’s one of Noël Coward’s early successes, following The Vortex and Easy Virtue and preceding Hay Fever; its rare reappearance on Broadway was occasioned by the availability of its two stars, Kelli O’Hara and Rose Byrne. They play upper-crust, somewhat overage English flappers who take advantage of the absence of their husbands (played by Aasif Mondavi and Christopher Fitzgerald) on a golfing holiday to set up a reunion with a Frenchman with whom they both had affairs before they were married. (The original West End production starred Tallulah Bankhead and Edna Best.)
Fallen Angels is a trifle that runs on a pair of jokes – that the women’s common ex-lover, Maurice (Mark Consuelos), fails to show up until their husbands have returned from their trip and that the wives get drunker and drunker while they wait. It’s a high comedy with plenty of farce, but Scott Ellis’s production omits the high comedy and overdoses on the farce. It’s tiresome; the ninety-minute running time feels way longer. You certainly have to admire the two actresses’ gamesmanship and stamina, though, and their besotted athleticism, particularly Byrne’s; you don’t see the strain in her physical work the way you do in O’Hara’s. The men are barely noticeable – and that’s the first time I’ve ever said such a thing about Fitzgerald. The most pleasurable element in the show is its look. The set designer, David Rockwell, and the costume designer, Jeff Mahshie, persuaded Ellis to update the setting by a few years to 1929-30 to take advantage of the change in style, and it was a wise decision: O’Hara and Byrne are splendiferous clotheshorses.
I saw the stage adaptation of the great 1935 Irving Berlin Top Hat by Matthew White (who also directed) and Howard Jacques in London a decade and a half ago and didn’t think much of it, but Kathleen Marshall staged and choreographed the recent West End revival, so when Great Performances televised it recently I thought it was worth a second look. Marshall does some fine work with the musical numbers, especially “Top Hat, White Tie and Tails” and “Cheek to Cheek” (which quotes some of the steps from this most famous Astaire-Rogers pas de deux), but the show is disastrously ill-conceived. The movie, which Mark Sandrich directed, has a beguiling, tossed-off style that perfectly matches Astaire’s elegant nonchalance. It’s an hour and forty-one minutes of bliss; not one scene goes on a moment longer than it should, and the romantic numbers seem to rise up magically out of the ether. By contrast, the stage version lumbers along, and it’s clumsily overstuffed – as well as the five songs Berlin wrote for the film (“No Strings,” “Top, Hat, White Tie and Tails,” “Isn’t It a Lovely Day to be Caught in the Rain,” “Cheek to Cheek” and “The Piccolino”), White and Jacques have added nine others from the Berlin repertoire. Both of the stars, Phillip Attmore as Jerry Travers and Amara Okereke as Dale Tremont, can dance, but neither of them acts convincingly and Attmore is a lousy singer – his phrasing is dreadful and he keeps wandering off-key. The only supporting player with any personality is James Clyde in the Erik Rhodes role, the ridiculous Italian dress designer Beddini, whose added solo, “Latins Know How” (interpolated from the 1940 Broadway musical Louisiana Purchase), is one of the few bright spots. The costumes by Peter McKintosh and Yvonne Milnes are livelier than McKintosh’s set.
Considering that The Fear of 13 is utterly shapeless, it’s a shock to see the gifted director David Cromer’s name attached to it. Perhaps he threw up his hands once he started to work with Lindsey Ferrentino’s script, which is based on the true story of Nick Yarris, an innocent man who is exonerated by DNA evidence after serving twenty-two years for rape and murder. In their early scenes Adrien Brody, who plays Yarris, and Tessa Thompson as Jacki Miles, a prison volunteer who falls in love with him, have authentic chemistry, but his acting quickly becomes self-involved and overheated. She’s quite good; the play is deadly.
Kyra is the catalyst for the conflict. She’s eager to jump into the conversation, she’s not put off by controversy, and she treats Elliot’s rather tyrannical handling of the board as a personal challenge. The issue that sets off adversarial fireworks is whether or not the board should work to get the city to put up a stop light in their neighborhood. Kyra, who has young daughters, is worried about their safety, but Elliot thinks a traffic light will obstruct a view that he deems one of the special qualities of the district. (The play is called The Balusters because the first item on the agenda is a local couple’s violating the style of the neighborhood, to Elliot’s mind, by importing balusters – from Home Depot, no less – to the façade of their house.) When Kyra refuses to back down, he treats her like an upstart who doesn’t understand the history of this place she has just moved into, or what he sees as its priorities. And their set-to has a racial tinge, though he denies it.
The play is fun for about two-thirds of the way, partly because the playwright exposes the characters’ hidden motivations with a certain scathing wit but mostly because the cast is so sharp. (Kenny Leon directs them with considerable skill.) Oliveras is the only member of the company whose touch on her lines is too heavy, but that isn’t entirely her fault: Luz is more a device than a character. I especially enjoyed watching Burke, with her floating, tremulous voice – she’s like a slightly decrepit fairy – and Colin, who does lovely, decorative things with her lines, wrapping them up like surprise gift packages.
The stockpiled revelations in the play are amusing, in a Desperate Housewives sort of way, but there are too many; eventually they weigh it down. But what takes the play apart, finally, is that, like his characters, Lindsay-Abbaire has an agenda. Though Kyra is no saint, Elliot turns out to be the real villain of the piece, which climaxes in an implausible explosion that even Richard Thomas, a superlative character actor, can’t pull off.
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| Rose Byrne and Kelli O'Hara in Fallen Angels. (Photo: Joan Marcus.) |
Broadway in HD carried the Roundabout Theatre revival of Fallen Angels for a few weeks last month. First produced in 1925, it’s one of Noël Coward’s early successes, following The Vortex and Easy Virtue and preceding Hay Fever; its rare reappearance on Broadway was occasioned by the availability of its two stars, Kelli O’Hara and Rose Byrne. They play upper-crust, somewhat overage English flappers who take advantage of the absence of their husbands (played by Aasif Mondavi and Christopher Fitzgerald) on a golfing holiday to set up a reunion with a Frenchman with whom they both had affairs before they were married. (The original West End production starred Tallulah Bankhead and Edna Best.)
Fallen Angels is a trifle that runs on a pair of jokes – that the women’s common ex-lover, Maurice (Mark Consuelos), fails to show up until their husbands have returned from their trip and that the wives get drunker and drunker while they wait. It’s a high comedy with plenty of farce, but Scott Ellis’s production omits the high comedy and overdoses on the farce. It’s tiresome; the ninety-minute running time feels way longer. You certainly have to admire the two actresses’ gamesmanship and stamina, though, and their besotted athleticism, particularly Byrne’s; you don’t see the strain in her physical work the way you do in O’Hara’s. The men are barely noticeable – and that’s the first time I’ve ever said such a thing about Fitzgerald. The most pleasurable element in the show is its look. The set designer, David Rockwell, and the costume designer, Jeff Mahshie, persuaded Ellis to update the setting by a few years to 1929-30 to take advantage of the change in style, and it was a wise decision: O’Hara and Byrne are splendiferous clotheshorses.
 |
| Phillip Attmore and company in Top Hat. (Photo: Johan Perrson.) |
I saw the stage adaptation of the great 1935 Irving Berlin Top Hat by Matthew White (who also directed) and Howard Jacques in London a decade and a half ago and didn’t think much of it, but Kathleen Marshall staged and choreographed the recent West End revival, so when Great Performances televised it recently I thought it was worth a second look. Marshall does some fine work with the musical numbers, especially “Top Hat, White Tie and Tails” and “Cheek to Cheek” (which quotes some of the steps from this most famous Astaire-Rogers pas de deux), but the show is disastrously ill-conceived. The movie, which Mark Sandrich directed, has a beguiling, tossed-off style that perfectly matches Astaire’s elegant nonchalance. It’s an hour and forty-one minutes of bliss; not one scene goes on a moment longer than it should, and the romantic numbers seem to rise up magically out of the ether. By contrast, the stage version lumbers along, and it’s clumsily overstuffed – as well as the five songs Berlin wrote for the film (“No Strings,” “Top, Hat, White Tie and Tails,” “Isn’t It a Lovely Day to be Caught in the Rain,” “Cheek to Cheek” and “The Piccolino”), White and Jacques have added nine others from the Berlin repertoire. Both of the stars, Phillip Attmore as Jerry Travers and Amara Okereke as Dale Tremont, can dance, but neither of them acts convincingly and Attmore is a lousy singer – his phrasing is dreadful and he keeps wandering off-key. The only supporting player with any personality is James Clyde in the Erik Rhodes role, the ridiculous Italian dress designer Beddini, whose added solo, “Latins Know How” (interpolated from the 1940 Broadway musical Louisiana Purchase), is one of the few bright spots. The costumes by Peter McKintosh and Yvonne Milnes are livelier than McKintosh’s set.
 |
| Adrien Brody and Tessa Thompson in The Fear of 13. (Photo: Emilio Madrid.) |
Considering that The Fear of 13 is utterly shapeless, it’s a shock to see the gifted director David Cromer’s name attached to it. Perhaps he threw up his hands once he started to work with Lindsey Ferrentino’s script, which is based on the true story of Nick Yarris, an innocent man who is exonerated by DNA evidence after serving twenty-two years for rape and murder. In their early scenes Adrien Brody, who plays Yarris, and Tessa Thompson as Jacki Miles, a prison volunteer who falls in love with him, have authentic chemistry, but his acting quickly becomes self-involved and overheated. She’s quite good; the play is deadly.
– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies. 
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